Love is that which transcends freedom and necessity, and the perfect outpouring of love in the Triune God is always a outward offering of divine love, so that just as the Father glorifies the Son and the Spirit, so do they each glorify the other members, the Godhead each receiving and dependent upon the other members for their divinity. This overflowing mystery of outward moving and self-differentiating love makes our own being and our own unity possible. The koinonia fellowship of the Trinity establishes an ontology of communion, of perfect shalom, which in turn establishes the very conditions of our very personhood.
As John Zizioulas has observed, "Being is communion;" we are persons because we move to transcend ourselves by finding ourselves in others and by offering ourselves to them. Or as Charles Taylor has observed, the most important aspects of our selves are found in relation with others not in isolation. We cannot even speak of ourselves rightly without acknowledging the debt we owe to all that defines us and gives us life. This is true because in a more profound, perfect way this same shared personality is found in God. Christ, eternally begotten of the Father is ever a fountain of love. The Spirit ever proceeds from the Father and through the Son as the love outpouring between them. We, too, in embodied ways are also “ekstastic” beings--we go out of ourselves for others' benefit, and in turn our very selves are based on others going out to us (Stanley Greenz 131-139). The joy of our existence is in fulfilling our personhood woven together with God and others and the creation itself. Such a web of existence reveals some essential aspects of education:
First, sociality is essential to the structure of the universe and, therefore, to teaching, especially the psychology of sociality and its eschatological possibilities for learning. Our desires and bonds of community are intended for the end of perfect fellowship and blessing in God, and we best change with that end in mind. Personal fulfillment is intinamtely related to our place in the web of relationships that make us who we are. Christians should mistrust models of education based on excessive competition, as well as academic environments that promote distrust and "dog eat dog" scholarship.
Second, our capacity for receiving and understanding truth, dependent upon the communicative virtues, is also a matter of the social nature of love in all its facets. The capacities that make good communication possible make great love possible, and together they offer a picture of the academy not as a place of self-advancement or ego-driven competition, but as one of the sharing of research and learning with the end of agape in ourselves and for God and others before us.
Third, the perfect shalom in the blessedness of the Godhead is part of the future promised us by the Christ-event. Until the Messiah completes his people in their maturity, presenting them to the Father, when all will be all in all, we are longing to recover some measure of that lost charity of relations and by his grace, modeling it. We are ever learning anew to love and loving in order that we might learn. Our pedagogies cannot overlook the interpersonal nature of teaching, learning, and acting, which we are ever seeking to settle into.
Fourth, being a "servant-leader" implies forming dispositions of giving and receiving well the gifts that are in all aspects of study. A personal relationship is always mediated with existing tangible objects and subjects. We don’t serve in the abstract; neither do we learn with theory alone before us. Theory is a form of praxis, not a foundation for action, but an implicate of practices with histories. The learner does not exist in some auto-didactic damnation of total isolation and self-reference. Such would be the solipsist's self-imposed nightmare. "Which way I fly am Hell; Myself am Hell," intoned Milton's Satan.
Phrases like "learning community" and "service learning" have become a bit trite through overuse, but their truth is ever true. We mirror God's fellowship when we image God together, and we image God together when we learn together. The question that remains before us as Christian educators is whether our teaching promotes this eschatological testimony found in discipleship groupings or a modern pedagogy of selves "delivered" from the oppressive “soul cages” of families, towns, and churches.
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